


When the Campfire Dims

by fairmanor



Series: Tough Talks [8]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Aromantic Stevie Budd, David needs to realise he does not in fact have big dreams, Episode: s06e13 Start Spreading the News, Family, Fluff, Invites, M/M, moving to New York, the cottage, wedding stress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26669887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: Patrick and Stevie discuss David's nonstop talking about New York and the friends he wants to invite to the wedding. They wish he could see that the things he really needs are right in front of him.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer & Stevie Budd, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: Tough Talks [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918438
Comments: 15
Kudos: 165





	When the Campfire Dims

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This time around, I thought it would be interesting to have a talk that was:  
> \- _about_ either David or Patrick but didn't necessarily include them; and  
> \- A talk that was more closely linked to canon/resolved by canon rather than a separate, canon-compliant issue.  
> \- Also, aromantic Stevie Budd. Because a girl's got her headcanons, okay?!
> 
> This one was hard to do because the chronology of The Pitch and Start Spreading the News are really confusing (or maybe I'm just dumb, who knows). Anyway, I hope you enjoy.
> 
> The title is from Gillian Welch’s “When a Cowboy Trades his Spurs for Wings” that I have Roland sing at the end.

It’s eleven o’clock at night, three and a half weeks before the wedding, and David finally lets himself say it: he is _exhausted_.

It’s not like he hasn’t said it before, of course. While Alexis was asking her to come out with him or Johnny wanted help with something at the motel, for example. Planning a wedding is a pretty good excuse to get out of anything. But he’s by himself right now, sitting on Patrick’s sofa in a sea of lists and phone numbers, the light from his laptop lightly frying his eyes that he refuses to close. Patrick is in the hallway on the phone to the last few members of his family, confirming their RSVPs and chasing others up and listening to the long-winded, placating reasons about why others can’t attend.

Exhaustion and overwhelm are chasing David quicker than he can get through this list. While he’s tempted to pack it in for the night and curl into Patrick’s lap and have a therapeutic cry, he’s even more determined to get the wedding guest list done so that he doesn’t have to think about it anymore. When Patrick comes back into the room, sighing loudly with relief, David feels even worse. Patrick’s list of friends and family must be twice the size of David’s, but he’s finished confirming all of his and David still can’t decide.

To be honest, the wedding is putting a lot of things into perspective for him in regard to who he considers friends and family. He knew from a young age that he didn’t have the same kinds of ties that Patrick did to the other people in his life. There’s no one outside of Johnny, Moira and Alexis that he would do anything for just “because they’re family”. There’s no one he loves but doesn’t like. No one he can’t ignore and cut off for the rest of his life if he wants.

“Friends done,” Patrick says, stretching his arms high over his head and pushing on his elbows. He cracks open a beer and flops down next to David with a tired grunt. David glares at him and makes a show of rearranging all the papers that were disturbed when Patrick sat down.

“What’s up with you?” Patrick asks as he takes a sip.

David sighs heavily. Unfortunately, the _I’m exhausted_ card doesn’t work on the person who’s also planning a wedding, unless he wants ten minutes of teasing snark about everything Patrick’s done that week. And to be fair, he does want that, but he’s too drained to play around at the moment.

“I seriously don’t know who to invite,” David says, showing Patrick the bulleted paper with the names of all the people he could remember from New York. He’d highlighted _one_ name in the pastel beige highlighter from the new back to school range they’d started trialling in the store. One. Tori Griffin was his old assistant at the gallery; fresh out of art school when he’d employed her, all Kanken backpacks and scratchy true-vint sweaters, she was the only person he’d ever known in that godforsaken city with a scrap of earnestness and respect. She’d since moved out of New York. David sometimes sees pictures of her and her wife trekking various trails in the west with chubby little babies on their backs.

He’s about to complain to Patrick about how hard it is to choose, and he would have probably thrown in some excuse about choosing people who’ll be correct for the vibe, but then something strikes him. He reaches for his laptop and pulls up all his old contacts, Facebook messages and emails, remembering the last people he was hanging out with when he was in New York. They still sent him messages sometimes to see how he was. Well, they had on his 31st birthday. And there was the time where one of them sort of invited him to a night out in Toronto, but that was before they had the car, so…now that he thinks about it, it _had_ been a while since he heard from them. But they were still there. They still liked his posts, he supposes. The idea of having them there, having them see him, filled him with motivation. The promise of satisfaction.

“I do know – six, I think, or seven people that I knew in the city. I have all their addresses here; I can message them and then send Stevie their details.”

David speeds ahead with the email. Patrick’s sitting there squinting at the names on the screen, his mouth twisted in a way that reminds David of his own.

“What?” he says once he’s finished typing.

“I just – are you sure, David?”

David drops his hands and turns to stare at Patrick. “Seriously? Honey, I have been trying to finetune this list all day, and suddenly seven names pop into my head all at once.”

“Exactly, that’s the problem,” Patrick says, and David can feel the irritation building inside him. “Do I even know these people? You’ve never mentioned them before.”

“Well, we had a very – a chill, casual friendship! We don’t need to be in each other’s pockets twenty-four seven.”

Patrick shrugs in a very _if you say so_ way and sits back. David wants to keep it going. The most stressed and irrational part of him wants to turn it into a fight, but he looks at the slight circles under Patrick’s eyes and the way he’s rolling his head on his shoulders and David can’t believe he even considered it. He sighs, closing his laptop shut and leaning back. Patrick stretches his arm along the cushions and gestures with his head for David to cuddle up to him.

“This is stressing me out,” David admits. “And not just the invites.”

“I know, baby,” Patrick agrees, “me too. I used to think wedding planning was only stressful because I didn’t want to get married the first time, but…damn. There’s so much to think of. And so many people to think of,” he adds with a chuckle as he looks down at the lists scattered around them on the coffee table and floor.

“Mm.”

David wants a big wedding. He does. He wants his family there, he wants to dance, he wants the tent and the lights and the pizza oven. He doesn’t even care that reading his vows will probably be embarrassing. He wants loving Patrick to literally be the theme of the day, adorned with string lights and gypsophilias. It’s going to be perfect.

As he and Patrick get ready for bed that night, the anxiety evolves itself into excitement at the thought of everything coming together in the way he wants. In the way he knows it will. Things in his new life have a funny way of working themselves out, and he knows that no matter what his wedding will be like a beacon, a golden and floral eye in the storm of his past. And his past will be there to see it, occupying seven chairs on his family’s side of the room. After a massage from Patrick and some tender sex that felt more like drinking a cup of honeyed tea than fucking, David falls asleep without sparing time to think about why he wants them there so much.

***

Two weeks after all the final guest list is confirmed, Patrick wonders how he could ever have been so naïve to believe that the most stressful part of it was over. Not only do they have the wedding, but now the whole business with New York is there to contend with. A looming, unwelcome presence, rather like the huge rotten apple that nearly fell on his head as he was heading out of his apartment this morning. He could barely get a word out of his family about anything else – and he thinks, with a pang, about these people he’s come to know as his family, and what all of this means for them now. His dad had once told him that you lay down roots in the place you get married, which is why he and Marcy read their vows in the beautiful little shiplapped white church just over the road from Patrick’s childhood home. They got married later in life, and had Patrick even later than that. They’d revisited the conversation a couple of days ago when his parents came to visit for the weekend, their last chance to see Patrick before he was a married man. He knew the story already, but it didn’t hurt to hear it again for the sake of comfort. The one about how both his parents had been so content with themselves for thirty-five years that they didn’t feel the need for anyone else until the right person came along. Until they found someone who enhanced then instead of completed them. They were both three and a half decades into life and yet they were each other’s first and last partners.

The story had warmed Patrick from the inside, as it always does. It reminds him of the devotion and patience he grew up surrounded by, the thought that his existence was whole and intentional and the product of nothing but pure, unadulterated love. He’s thinking about it now as he unlocks the door of the Apothecary, flipping the switch and replacing the natural light of morning that pales the dusty beige cladding with bright, happy artificiality.

He seats himself behind the desk, half-smiling at David’s misspelled text about how he promises he’ll get out of bed and join him at work soon. He’s already there with David’s coffee order in preparation and looks up smiling when the bell chimes, but his face drops when he realises it isn’t David.

“Well, don’t look so pleased to see me,” is the greeting he receives instead, the little powerhouse of plaid and icy stares frowning at the disappointment on Patrick’s face.

Patrick shakes himself awake. “Sorry, Stevie. It’s just I was expecting –”

“David? Yeah, well here’s hoping he won’t come in for another few minutes at least.” Stevie looks out the window quickly as though David is going to be there, then unbuttons her satchel. “I have to show you something, and he’s not going to like it.”

Patrick frowns. He grips David’s hot coffee cup in anticipation of moving into action mode and taking the drink back to his apartment for David to nurse over his imminent loud tears at whatever hell Stevie is about to unleash.

“Oh, God. Okay, just say it.”

She doesn’t say it. Stevie shows him instead, pulling her iPad out of her bag and tapping on the digital guest list she’s been updating as the last few cancellations come in.

All of David’s New York friends have rejected the invite.

Patrick meets Stevie’s eye. She looks just as he expected her to. Nervous and unsure about how this is going to go down.

“Stevie…”

“I know.”

“That was _so_ important to him.”

Stevie nods gravely. “I know.”

“That…” Patrick scrubs a hand over his face, his worst fears realised.

_That was important to him. New York is important to him. You can’t even give him that._

“And I came here because I knew David isn’t usually in just yet, and I wanted to ask for advice about how to break the news,” Stevie says, wincing.

For the past week, both of them had been sharing quick glances while they were in each other’s company and David would get excited about trivial things like an email from one of his friends. It would usually be something like ‘Congrats’ or ‘Will RVSP soon’, but it would always send David off on a rant about how he couldn’t wait to see their faces when they saw him walking down the aisle. And it might have been somewhat endearing to Patrick, knowing David was aware of his own happiness and being a large factor in its cause, but ever since the additional news about the Rosebud Motel Group deal David’s fixation on New York was becoming almost too much to bear.

“I have no idea,” Patrick says honestly. “I just – ugh…”

He groans, putting his head in his hands and then raking them through his hair.

“Okay, I appreciate your empathy for your fiancé’s situation, but this seems to be bothering you way more than I thought it would,” Stevie says, dipping her head to meet Patrick’s lowered eye. He pushes his head down even further until his chin is resting on his hands.

“I can’t stop thinking about how everything’s going to change after the wedding,” Patrick says almost inaudibly.

Even though she knows exactly what he means, Stevie scoffs to lighten the mood. “Dude, you’re gonna be married. I’d say there are gonna be pretty big changes all round regardless.”

“I know. I just…the past few weeks have been really stressful for both of us. And I can’t help but think when this is all over, when everyone leaves and it’s just me and David, that I…won’t be able to give him everything he wants.” Stevie makes to retort, but Patrick ploughs ahead. “I know I’d be fine with a quiet wedding – hell, I’d marry him at the registry office _yesterday_ if I could – but I know different things are important to different people, and I’m going to give David a whole song and dance because that’s what he wants. But I can’t give him his old life back. I can’t give him New York, or any of the satisfaction, or –”

It’s only when Stevie awkwardly hands him a tissue that Patrick realises there are tears streaming down his face.

“Patrick. Wherever David goes with you, he’ll be happy,” Stevie says earnestly. He’s noticed in the past that talking serious comes easier for her with Patrick than it does when he’s borne witness to her and David’s painful attempts at sincerity. Right now, he’s not complaining. “I’ve had to sit through far too many rambles about how much he loves you – both drunken _and_ sober – to seriously believe he wouldn’t live in a house with hot coals for floors if it meant you were there as well.”

Ah. Speaking of houses.

Patrick says as much out loud, and Stevie’s eyebrows rise.

“Wait – you found somewhere? In New York?” she says, and Patrick clings onto the disappointment in her voice.

“No, here,” he says. “I’ve been looking at houses here. There’s one that David loves on the outskirts of town. You know Kingswood Street?”

Stevie tuts and rolls her eyes. “Of _course_ David picks a house on the most expensive street in the town.”

Patrick wants to go into detail about how when you jot up all their living expenses and compare the mortgage to all their savings then it would actually be a pretty worthwhile purchase, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Because they’re all going to New York, and Patrick won’t get to do anything for David again that David can’t find at the end of the street or a phone call away.

He also wants to go into detail about how disheartened and useless and fucking lonely it makes him feel to see everyone raring to leave this place behind. He can’t speak for the rest of them, but he has a feeling that everyone, in some way or another, started their lives here. Roland and Jocelyn in a literal sense. The Roses, who, against all odds, became _actually_ rich for the first time in their lives between the cracked paper of the motel walls. Felt the comfort and weight of each other’s arms for the first time. And as for him…well. It wasn’t something he liked to think about for too long on an average day. Sometimes he still felt like he’d been saved from drowning and was still coughing the waters of his old life up from his lungs, such was he couldn’t believe his luck.

But he doesn’t need to say any of that. Stevie already knows.

“You know, David once asked me to come and live with him in New York.”

Patrick looks up. “Really?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I’m assuming this is when they thought they were going to get some money back,” he says, remembering that detail among the countless that David had told him when he was filling him in on his life here so far in the early days of their relationship.

“Yeah. It didn’t go over so well. I was still attached to him after our thing. I thought it was romantic at the time, but obviously I know better now,” Stevie says with a knowing laugh. “But all things considered, I thought it was a pretty dick move of him.”

“Mm,” Patrick agrees. He’s sort of heard the story before; he knows David feels bad about how flippantly he treated Stevie back then. Even if she identifies as aromantic now, she was attached to David in a way that David didn’t acknowledge. That’s another thing this town has brought them all, Patrick thinks, even if he wasn’t there to witness it. Healing. And real, mutual love.

“The thing was, I knew he didn’t want it even when he said it,” Stevie continues. “He was manic. I think he was panicking about leaving. Even back then he must have seen me as some kind of – I don’t know, familiarity? I think having me in New York would have grounded him if he’d gone, even if he didn’t respect my feelings.”

Patrick nods. “So you don’t think David actually wants to move to New York now.”

“Oh, I think he wants to 'move to New York',” Stevie says, and Patrick’s heart sinks a little bit – okay, a lot – “but I don’t think he knows why. David has this habit of thinking everything’s too good to be true, so he has to run off and find the next thing before it all slips away from him and he gets hurt again.”

It’s not hard to imagine. Patrick thinks about his refusal to reach out after the barbecue that he knew couldn’t entirely have been to do with the gifts, thinks about the whole situation with Ken, thinks about his sudden and random eagerness to get away now. It’s not hard to imagine at all.

“He has big dreams,” Stevie says, sounding an awful lot like David. “Or at least he thinks he does.”

“I know,” Patrick mutters. He wishes there was something he could do to show David how simple his dreams really were. How well he and Stevie knew him; knew him like he never let anyone know him before, knew him until he was rambling stoned or sobbing into the sheets or laughing so hard that he didn’t care how he looked or sounded for once in his life. They knew he wanted to stay. And unfortunately, there were some things that simple talking wouldn’t solve. David, to some extent, would have to work this one out on his own.

Stevie puts her iPad back in her bag. “You know, I find it so much easier to imagine him staying here. Having one of those houses on Kingswood Street. Doing townie shit. Running the store, and –”

Stevie cuts herself off with a self-deprecating scoff. She waves a hand in front of her reddening face. “Ugh, look at us! Crying about David fucking Rose at nine in the morning!”

Patrick laughs wetly, a few more tears surpassing his cheeks and dropping straight onto the counter. “This is a shot in the dark, but I think it might be because we love him.”

Stevie swats at his arm. “Don’t remind me.”

They share one last, meaningful smile, and Stevie leaves. Patrick wonders if she’ll mention anything to David about the house. David comes and goes, gushing about some apartment Alexis has found in the city that Patrick can barely even bring himself to name in his head anymore, and he hopes Stevie does mention it. _God,_ he hopes she does.

***

The next two days pass in a blur.

At the very end of that messy day that had made Patrick cry after David had left him to write his vows, David had returned, his face red and dehydrated from the salt of too many tears and all but collapsed into Patrick’s arms, crying all over again. He hadn’t seemed to have the energy to tell Patrick why he was crying, and Patrick didn’t have the energy to press for details. The pale little hand printed on his sweater was stained with tears, so Patrick had made him take it off and readied it for hand washing after he got David into bed with a glass of water. David didn’t say much at all, but he had looked around the room and the view from the window as though he was cherishing it. Though, Patrick noted, it wasn’t the same look he’d given it earlier that day, as though he was seeing it for one of the last times. He looked at it as though he was watching something he loved come back from the dead.

And then the next afternoon, it all made sense.

It was a funny thing to pick up on, but Patrick couldn’t help but notice the change in David’s wardrobe from one day to the next. As he rubbed Patrick’s arm and looked up at their future home together, his sweater was like an unintentional sequel to the one he’d been wearing yesterday. Two pale hands, holding fire. Stevie had been right in the short text she sent him yesterday. David did take the news of his friend’s rejections quite well after all, if it meant he chose this future instead.

That evening, David and Patrick are invited to a night out at the Schitt’s with the Rose family and Stevie to celebrate their new careers and the moves. Roland has a surprisingly well-kept fire pit in his back yard that he takes pride in, lined with sandstone and ringed with a beautiful set of wicker rattan chairs. Against all half-assed protest from David, Patrick brings his guitar, and maybe it’s the beer or maybe it’s because he’s sort of become family that Patrick relinquishes control of it to Roland at some point in the night and lets him bust out ‘Hey Jude’ three times in a row, simply because humans are physically incapable of not singing along to the outro. And if there’s anything they need to round off the past couple of weeks, it’s to sing badly but together.

David curls up next to Patrick with his sleeves over his arms, twirling marshmallows idly in the fire and eating them in what he insists is the ‘correct’ way: charring the outside, peeling off the outer layer of skin, having Patrick feed it to him, then repeating the process until the marshmallow is gone.

Stevie sits on his right, an umpteenth can of beer in her hand and a sparkler in the other. Her eyes are lidded with drunk satisfaction, and she looks just as cozy as David in her plaid fleece jacket.

“Hey, Patrick?” David mumbles into Patrick’s shoulder when he’s finished his last marshmallow and Roland is rounding off his show-off session with _Bluebird_ and _When A Cowboy Trades His Spurs For Wings._ Patrick can feel his fiancé’s sleepy weight press down on him and knows he should get him to bed soon.

“Yes, David?”

“You know I never wanted to move to New York, right?”

He does know. Patrick does know, and _God_ , maybe it’s the beer again, maybe it’s the sparks from the firelight or the joke his father-in-law is telling or maybe it’s the love, but there are tears in his eyes again and he wants to cry with devotion and pride for this determined, healing, beautiful man who had had a talk with himself for once and decided what he wanted. Well, not without a little push from Stevie mentioning the house. Because Stevie never helped, except when she really, really did.

“I know, David.”

David snuggles into the fleece that Patrick got from Mountain Warehouse, the one David always says he hates, and breathes it in.

“I love you, Patrick.”

Patrick looks around at his parents, his cousins, his sisters, in the fading light, gently illuminated by the fire. He turns to David, sees the fire in his eyes, the fire in the hands on his sweater, and kisses the top of his head.

“I love you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> These are the songs I imagined Roland playing, because the image of Roland being able to sing and play the guitar warms my heart for some reason: 
> 
> [Bluebird](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRc2Vk3GFCM)
> 
> [Cowboy](https://youtu.be/1HJjeyn-uOM)


End file.
